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> Companies are allowed to train on copyrighted works I’m curious what you mean by this. If I’m not allowed under copyright law to make a personal copy of the

by dahart 3y ago

> Companies are allowed to train on copyrighted works I’m curious what you mean by this. If I’m not allowed under copyright law to make a personal copy of the latest Pixar movie or watch it without permission or payment, even if I’m not sharing it with anyone else, what under the law allows a company to make a copy and train on it? I thought I understood copyright law to not only prohibit redistribution of copyrighted works without permission, but also to prohibit consumption of copyrighted works without permission? Is that accurate? In that sense, I would have thought copyright law does prohibit companies from training on copyrighted works.

brookst 3y ago
You’re hitting on the distinction between duplication and training. I own hundreds of paperback books. Copyright law does not limit what I can learn from them. It may be that assembling a corpus for training is illegal, but if so, that would be true even if it was never used for training. The act of training an AI is orthogonal to the collection of the corpus.
- dahart 3y ago
  I think I’m not necessarily talking about training. It’s the duplication before training, and maybe just the fact that training is consuming the entire work, which I think under copyright law requires permission (which typically means payment). > It may be that assembling a corpus for training is illegal, but if so, that would be true even if it was never used for training. Yeah, exactly! You’re right that copyright law doesn’t limit what you can learn at all, and doesn’t copyright ideas. But it does, I think, limit whether you’re allowed to read the copyrighted work in it’s entirety the first place, if you haven’t paid for it or legally borrowed a copy or whatever. Gaining access to the material is covered under the law, right? This does mean, I suspect, that assembling a corpus of copyrighted training material is not allowed under copyright law, unless it was all paid for or licensed with permission. If the AI companies have paid for all the material they used to train, then my question might be moot, I’m assuming they didn’t pay for it. This is murky when there’s a lot of copyrighted material that’s available online, maybe with the intent that it would be consumed in small parts and not copied wholesale by machines for the sole purpose of making software that can replicate the content and style of what it learned.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
> I’m not allowed under copyright law to make a personal copy of the latest Pixar movie or watch it without permission or payment, even if I’m not sharing it with anyone else. You aren't, but in many cases it doesn't matter because, even for USians, you're protected by the fair use exception. And even in some other cases like for educators and archivists where it extends further. When we get new laws for the training of neural networks, I would expect their spirit to be based on the state of this exception.

by dahart 3y ago

brookst 3y ago

You’re hitting on the distinction between duplication and training. I own hundreds of paperback books. Copyright law does not limit what I can learn from them. It may be that assembling a corpus for training is illegal, but if so, that would be true even if it was never used for training. The act of training an AI is orthogonal to the collection of the corpus.

dahart 3y ago
I think I’m not necessarily talking about training. It’s the duplication before training, and maybe just the fact that training is consuming the entire work, which I think under copyright law requires permission (which typically means payment). > It may be that assembling a corpus for training is illegal, but if so, that would be true even if it was never used for training. Yeah, exactly! You’re right that copyright law doesn’t limit what you can learn at all, and doesn’t copyright ideas. But it does, I think, limit whether you’re allowed to read the copyrighted work in it’s entirety the first place, if you haven’t paid for it or legally borrowed a copy or whatever. Gaining access to the material is covered under the law, right? This does mean, I suspect, that assembling a corpus of copyrighted training material is not allowed under copyright law, unless it was all paid for or licensed with permission. If the AI companies have paid for all the material they used to train, then my question might be moot, I’m assuming they didn’t pay for it. This is murky when there’s a lot of copyrighted material that’s available online, maybe with the intent that it would be consumed in small parts and not copied wholesale by machines for the sole purpose of making software that can replicate the content and style of what it learned.

BlueTemplar 3y ago

> I’m not allowed under copyright law to make a personal copy of the latest Pixar movie or watch it without permission or payment, even if I’m not sharing it with anyone else. You aren't, but in many cases it doesn't matter because, even for USians, you're protected by the fair use exception. And even in some other cases like for educators and archivists where it extends further. When we get new laws for the training of neural networks, I would expect their spirit to be based on the state of this exception.